Bird's reply

Dear passerby,

I didn't mean to feed you dark ideas and feelings by throwing myself off that tree the other day; I've been meaning to tell you that I'm sorry. I didn't do it on purpose. In fact, I didn't know you we're watching. But I must say... This day I was feeling pretty shitty just like the days you say that are still ahead.

You know we, the birds have this tremendous capacity for announcement. We're kind of wing-equipped Nostradamuses. Everyone knows about the divine capacity of the swallow to announce the return of the love season (it's precisely the reason why the belief of the contrary spread to the point of converting itself into a proverb: men were jealous of a brain being so small, but able to make a little body fly and predict unknown events such as the coming of warmer days). Nevertheless, if you wanna know why you don't see so many of these blue birds in the grey sky of our urbs these days, I would tell you that the hypothesis of further shitty days to come might put you on the right investigation track.

Now, what motivated me to jump off that naked tree without trying to resist gravity's force - despite of my power to do so - is a mystery to me. In fact, it wasn't motivated. It would be more accurate to say that it was a feeling: the feeling that there was a whole bunch of shitty days that lay ahead, and I just didn't want to take part. You know, when you have a premonition,, or a bad feeling to speak in a rational way, your response will be to avoid what you apprehend. Now, you tell me about a better way to avoid than dying.

I am now just another cloud. One of those, that you might say has the shape and form of a bird, right next to the cloud in the form of a tree. Yeah, that's right I'm standing on one of its branches. And I see all you folks and your whole civilization collapsing. You wanna know what's ahead for you, my dear first world friends? From here I see Bangladesh and Haiti, I see Rwanda and Burundi and my bad feeling tells me that the only difference between living in your lousy consumers' society and their chaotic, violent and over-exploited people and lands will be the colour of the skin of the inhabitants. Soon the water supply will dry up and all the oil that was once in our soils will have become smoke that we'll be breathing to find oxygen. I'd rather die quickly from one of the last trees that's left than slowly choked on the rooftop of a building because there are no more trunks in which I can find a hole to pass away in quietly.

Sincerely yours,

Dead Bird

Tell-Tale Signs Of Shitty Days To Come

Get to a street that's usually crowded, but it's not. Understandable, 7AM is no time to exist. If anything, early-birds should wake up at this time, or die. Which is the point, isn't it? Because on this Monday morning, on Sainte-Catherine street, a bird commits suicide. Falls right off a tree branch, falls neck first on the asphalt and stops moving. Forever. Right across the street from me, becomes car fodder.

Chances are it was a natural death, and it just fell. Or that it had broken wings and couldn't escape its fate. But it could also be that it couldn't bear to live in this place. Not like this. Not in this day and age. A bird like Hunter S. Thompson, like Elliott Smith. Man we're fucked if it's come to this.

And it does, indeed seem like it's the case, when one of the busiest patches of circulation cement is so desolate, the sky is so grey, the world's economy is on the brink of collapsing, wars are raging, Elections are happening and seemingly complementary with possibilities of hostile Conservatism takeovers... I could understand why a bird wouldn't want to live here anymore.

Sure, there are pieces of paradise in the Caribbean, but can't the birds sense danger looming? Perhaps the prettiest islands on earth are also doomed.

And some species are more apt at survival. Rats, locusts, roaches, vermin. Birds can fly away, but if you take away their desire to fly, break their wings by breaking their minds, their spirit - they will be left with nothing. Just like us. We mostly seem to be able to take it, some of us barely, a few can't at all. It's a wonder why we do, though. We are fully aware that there are too many of us in this world, not only for comfort, but also for the planet's ressources and balance. And billions of us go on with misery, unhappiness, useless stress, obeying corporate or actual masters for no good reason at all. You've got to know Keith Richards knew what he was doing when he fell out of that tree a few years ago. He knew. He had decided. He missed. And The Beast took him back in, told him he had better not do it again, and off he went Rolling Stoning again with his buddies, ridding the world of half of its drug-and-alcohol content selflessly, as a one-man sniffing task force.

But birds, eh? Way to start the day. One has to end for another one to start? Good thing I ever hardly sleep, I'm doing more than my part. But as the sun was coming up this morning on a grey artery that barely keeps the city's blood alive, the light seemed terribly dark.